This Valentine’s Day, Anita and I will be celebrating our 25th year of marriage! We can’t believe that many years have gone by…so quickly and yet so amazingly full of way too many blessings to begin to count. We had both ended first marriages and as God seems to have always been with us, we happened to meet while working for the same company we had been working for quite a while but didn’t know each other.

All throughout my life, I have always focused too much on the difficulties I have gone through and as I look back at all of those times, when I thought everything was never going my way…I now plainly see that all that time, I was constantly being saved and blessed by God. After my Dad passed away, about 28 years ago, my life took a 180 degree turn around, starting with finding someone who has been my best friend ever since – Anita. I know that my Dad has been guiding me all these years, from marrying Anita to celebrating over 7 years of growth and success of David’s Music House. Anita and I have worked and been together almost daily since 1993, and now we are blessed to both work together at David’s Music House. I know that ongoing success of DMH will have so much to do with Anita being the face to our DMH Families. I have never known another person who in a few short minutes of spending time with people, uplifts the spirits of those she talks with for the rest of their day. I have watched her do this from the very first time I saw her and she still is doing this at ‘da House. People’s faces light up with smiles and they just feel good, even after they leave DMH because she spent some time catching up on their lives. The very BEST thing about Anita..is that I get to be with her all the time. I have never stopped feeling so blessed that I have been given the Gift of Anita.

sooooo…anyway….what else is going on? (sorry..I begin to ramble when I talk about Anita)

We are kicking up the Performance Learning aspect of what we teach at DMH. We are leaving the stage set up with sound and mics and equipment so teachers can bring students up during their lesson and introduce them to being on the stage.

We are introducing “Student Open Stage” at the DMH Coffee House beginning in February! So here’s how it works. During lessons, teachers will bring some of their students to the stage just to introduce them to being on it. They are actually taking a first step out of the Lesson Room to begin performance training. Next, whenever any teacher feels they have a few students who are ready to get more stage experience, they will sign them up on our All The Time DMH Open Stage List. Any teacher can, on any evening, prepare students (up to 5 per any night) to perform in an Open Stage format for their friends and family. This is a Second Step in Performance Training. All of this prepares DMH students for the more organized, Monthly Student Showcases, where students should now be much more prepared to look and talk to the audience, engage an audience and not “run off the stage” but stay and audibly Thank the audience for their attention and applause.

One of the weakest aspects of most ALL musicians is that NO ONE EVER PREPARED THEM TO PERFORM ON A STAGE! I have wanted to make this a big part of what DMH does since I opened the doors. We are NOW getting more serious about making this part of each student’s learning.

“The Lesson Room is only the FIRST Step”

We are also bringing on a couple of new teachers to our DMH Team. James Diller is an excellent guitar player and teacher who will be teaching beginning to advanced guitar. Nathan Weese, who you may recognize as the 1st Place Winner of the 2018 Washington’s Got Talent” contest. Nathan will be teaching piano as a Level 2 DMH Teacher beginning February and until he goes to college this fall. We are introducing a new program for learning teachers who are at the beginning and during college years, who will give beginning lessons at a reduced cost, as they are not yet fully degreed. We hope this will give high school graduates and those still persuing a college degree in music, some great teaching experience, that they don’t provide at college. You can check out the BIO’s of both James and Nathan on our www.davidsmusichouse.com website on the Music Lesson page.

There’s more to say, but I’ll save some of that for next and upcoming months.

Anita and I thank you each from the bottom of our hearts for coming to David’s Music House and for showing us your love back.